If I encoded some child porn in transaction amounts or something, and stored it in the block chain, and released a program to decode and display it, would that make it illegal for anyone to use Bitcoin (since possession of child pornography is illegal)?

If I encoded some child porn in transaction amounts or something, and stored it in the block chain, and released a program to decode and display it, would that make it illegal for anyone to use Bitcoin (since possession of child pornography is illegal)?

I don't think so, but it would make you a felon just about anywhere.

"The powers of financial capitalism had another far-reaching aim, nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole. This system was to be controlled in a feudalist fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert, by secret agreements arrived at in frequent meetings and conferences. The apex of the systems was to be the Bank for International Settlements in Basel, Switzerland, a private bank owned and controlled by the world's central banks which were themselves private corporations. Each central bank...sought to dominate its government by its ability to control Treasury loans, to manipulate foreign exchanges, to influence the level of economic activity in the country, and to influence cooperative politicians by subsequent economic rewards in the business world."

It's probably not illegal, but it might become a controversial. The 10kB limit on transactions would allow a low-resolution image to be included in a single chunk. Maybe generators would agree to purge it by re-doing some blocks (though this is probably not sustainable).

This is another benefit of having a "backbone" of generators: only the generators would have to deal with the legal risk, while normal users wouldn't actually be possessing any illegal data.

Such a thing would force bitcoin's developers to focus on the pruning of the blockchain, upsetting the development timeline, but would not spell an end to Bitcoin itself. A pruned blockchain couldn't be considered a vector for child porn.

"The powers of financial capitalism had another far-reaching aim, nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole. This system was to be controlled in a feudalist fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert, by secret agreements arrived at in frequent meetings and conferences. The apex of the systems was to be the Bank for International Settlements in Basel, Switzerland, a private bank owned and controlled by the world's central banks which were themselves private corporations. Each central bank...sought to dominate its government by its ability to control Treasury loans, to manipulate foreign exchanges, to influence the level of economic activity in the country, and to influence cooperative politicians by subsequent economic rewards in the business world."

Such a thing would force bitcoin's developers to focus on the pruning of the blockchain, upsetting the development timeline, but would not spell an end to Bitcoin itself. A pruned blockchain couldn't be considered a vector for child porn.

Full network nodes can't prune unspent transactions, so the attacker could just not ever spend the image-transaction.

I'm not necessarily talking about unwitting possession. Assume I publicly release and announce a program to decode the child porn from the block chain, such that everyone knows and can easily confirm that there's child porn in the block chain.

There is no such thing as data that cannot be converted into some other data if I get to choose the algorithm.

Obviously if I publish the algorithm that does this there will be public outcry against Obama and google, since I got the picture from them.

Assume that the algorithm is something generic like "Find the transaction with this hash and handle its data as a JPEG image", such that a reasonable person can tell the child porn is stored in the block chain and not in the decoding program.

I'm not necessarily talking about unwitting possession. Assume I publicly release and announce a program to decode the child porn from the block chain, such that everyone knows and can easily confirm that there's child porn in the block chain.

There is no such thing as data that cannot be converted into some other data if I get to choose the algorithm.

Obviously if I publish the algorithm that does this there will be public outcry against Obama and google, since I got the picture from them.

Assume that the algorithm is something generic like "Find the transaction with this hash and handle its data as a JPEG image", such that a reasonable person can tell the child porn is stored in the block chain and not in the decoding program.

Fair enough I suppose.

It all comes down to how willing people are to hurt us when we haven't hurt anyone. Does it really matter if we did the non-offense they accuse us of or whether they make up that we did a real crime? Either way they make the rule, they level the charge, they arbitrate the dispute, they enforce the judgement.

I'm not going to get violent with them, so it's pretty much completely in their court (haha, pun intended).

Play Bitcoin Poker at sealswithclubs.eu. We're active and open to everyone.

Assume I publicly release and announce a program to decode the child porn from the block chain, such that everyone knows and can easily confirm that there's child porn in the block chain.

Publicly announce where?

Publicly announce it here and one of the moderators will delete it faster than you can type 'rm'.Announce it on your own website and I'd encourage the legal authorities and/or your ISP to shut you down.

Announce it in IRC chat or via a Freenet/TOR/i2p hidden service and I would personally encourage everybody to shun and /ignore you... and very few people will hear your announcement, anyway.

I suppose you could try to get a journalist or government interested in causing trouble for bitcoin to publicly announce it. If you did, I would ask as loudly as I could why the journalist or government is complaining about innocent bitcoin users instead of trying to track you down and prosecute you.

How often do you get the chance to work on a potentially world-changing project?

Because of the default client now does not support any non-standard transactions (isStandard() function), and bitcoin is only specifically advertised & designed as currency by its creators, this case will be classified by courts the same as using a phone for coordinating a bank robbery would be.

The telephone operator cannot be held responsible for actions of a criminal which used the phone to do some evil.

One way it could be done, would be for someone to aquire a good amount of BTC, then encode the data as annonymous donations to several innocent addresses, those transfers once validated become permanently embedded in the blockchain, right? Then after a month or so, after the data has become an essential part of the blockchain of the network, that person releases the program to aquire and decode the data and the knowledge about it on Freenet where no censorship can take it down.

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